


[on what we're trying to do]

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: [to see you there] [9]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Clint Has Issues, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, aftermath of mind control, idiosyncratic relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 02:51:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9414728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: In real life, things take a long time to get better. And sometimes, they just don't.Natalia's not sure which one this is.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I actually did not EXPECT to do more than a few tweaks to this one, and then a full rewrite happened, so much like the previous fic: this is my preferred version, the other is locked to AO3 users and solely a redirect, oh my god shoot me. 
> 
> Quick reminder that I ignore character backstory/etc that wasn't established by _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ , so details from _Ultron_ onwards are not really relevant.

It's been a few months since the Battle of New York, and now, now Natalia's starting to get concerned.

As a way of talking about the whole fucking mess, "Battle of New York"'s been in common usage everywhere from TV to official paperwork for long enough by now that it doesn't even feel strange. Not until you think about it for a moment, and realize you're talking about something that happened in 2012 in New York, not 1940-something in Europe, or wherever the last "Battle of" that springs to mind happened to live - and that wasn't North America, and wasn't Manhattan, not for well over a hundred years.

Except now it is, and on top of that it's like something out of pulp fiction: a fucking wormhole opening and alien invaders pouring out of the blue sky. You have to stop and think about it by now, for all that _surreal_ to kick back in.

The city's still a ball of frantic, frenetic, defiant buzzing activity, and constant defensive assertions that they're fine, they'll get through this, they get through everything, they're _New York_ , and sometimes lashing out at outsiders who dare voice an opinion. Especially if that opinion touches on 9/11, or wonders how that's going to change what happens now. It's not even a matter of the right opinion or the wrong one, as far as Natalia's seen: be from somewhere other than New York and _have_ one out in public, and you can expect half the city to jump down your throat.

There's no question about what to do about the destruction, though, and if nothing else it's a really good time to be in construction. A lot of the buildings are close to being rebuilt, between the influx of money - state, federal, charitable both private and public, hell, the mayor accepted the foreign aid from Canada and Britain without waiting to see what anyone else thought about it, and dared anyone to tell him no - and the massive campaign of very deliberate PR and outreach that's made Natalia wonder idly if the man's got a double somewhere who can sleep for him.

Stark Tower's finished on the outside, although Natalia wonders if Stark'll ever be finished on the inside. He's like the kind of housewife who's constantly fiddling with rearranging her furniture, except he does it with whole floors, including supporting structures. And he's staying absolutely dedicated to his friendship offerings of private floors with whatever people want on them.

Natalia's been avoiding him. He's not actually being an asshole, and it's not his fault he's grating on her nerves, since so is half the universe right now, but it's enough she'd have to put on an act not to snap at him. Natalia doesn't want to do that if she doesn't have to. If nothing else, there's a small but viable chance he'll notice, and that'd take a hammer to the fragile rapport they've managed to construct. Banner's still at the Tower and so is Ross, and Natalia feels relatively confident that's working out the way she meant it to. There may be an added bonus: the few times Natalia's happened to be around, she's gotten the strong impression that Ross and Stark are getting along a lot better than either of them expected. God knows Stark could use as many positive influences as he can get.

She gathers SHIELD is in the process of moving Rogers to DC and also running him through accelerated courses on everything he'll need to know to function in what for him is still the future, even while he's living in it. He'd got the elementary set while still in the tail end of recovery, because it turns out being frozen alive messes with even the legendary super-soldier's system enough that he needed a week or two after regaining consciousness to feel 100%. That'd been the very basic, though: stuff like, here's all the standard domestic and personal technology you don't know about, here's the basic layout of the world, here's the major change in basic laws and politics, and here's all the words you really, really shouldn't use. Ever.

It's obvious to Natalia that at some point he just decided to talk like he's reading a formal essay to a critical audience, because formal Standard American English hasn't changed that much. She's interested in seeing how fast he'll pick up all the quirks of modern informal language, and which subset he'll end up claiming as his own. It's not like there aren't dozens of them.

They haven't heard anything from Thor, and nobody has any idea how to reach him, including Foster - to Foster's obvious and intense chagrin. When pressed by the agent she'd met with, she'd lost her temper and snapped, "Look, he literally stood in the middle of the god-damned New Mexico desert and shouted for Heimdall, okay? _That's it_. That's all I know. You can try it if you want. Fuck knows I did. But _that's all I know._ "

Then she'd thrown the SHIELD agent and all the analysts out of her lab.

That had been a mishandle, and Natalia'd left a formal memo of observation on the report, and tried not to miss Coulson. She's pretty sure that's going to be a running theme in the next handful of years. She doesn't handle _missing_ people well. She can acknowledge grief and loss, knows when emotion is something she just needs to purge, but wistful things like _missing_ something mess her up if she lingers with them or does more than look at them, know they're there, and then move on. She's largely adept at that. It isn't like her life hasn't been littered with funerals, some of them even friends. It's a dangerous job. But as cold-blooded as it would probably seem to most people, most of those didn't come with a significant drop in working efficiency.

Not that work's become inefficient, as such. It's just moved from _hyper_ to _standard_ on the scale. Out of silent unmentioned deference to the high likelihood of Clint putting a bullet through Sitwell and taking off if he had to work with the man again, Strike Team Delta - which is effectively Natalia, Clint, and whoever else they need at the moment - are now directly under Fury's auspices, with one of Coulson's PAs redesignated as their liaison. In practical terms, it just means that any mission they get's going to come through the liaison, Clarke, and she'll be the safety buffer as Sitwell settles in to running External Operations. And that if they've got problems, it gets tossed right on Nick's desk without having to go through Sitwell first, greatly increasing Sitwell's likely lifespan.

It all works well enough. Standard efficiency for SHIELD is pretty good. But if Natalia never really gets used to anything, she had _enjoyed_ being able to rely on it being _hyper-efficient_ , the last few years. Standard efficiency is a bit of a letdown, and it compounds the sense of loss.

Natalia knows she's got plenty of company on that one, but for her this kind of pain isn't halved by sharing it, and there's a hard limit on how much of other people's she can even tolerate. SHIELD has an excellent psychiatric staff for a reason, and handling people's emotional pain is their job. And of the people who won't let them do it . . . well, Maria's handling it well. In the dark back corner of her mind, Natalia's concerned that Nick isn't handling it at all, but those aren't waters she can wade in, and if she tried he'd do something stupid.

And all things considered, Clint's still handling _everything_ well. After all, Selvig's in a full-time in-patient psychiatric care facility, and the odds of him getting out this year are almost nil. She's heard some speculation that the odds of him ever getting out aren't great. Apparently in the midst of the endless symbols and equations he scribbles that make absolutely no sense, there are always a few pages of stuff that makes the relevant sections of SHIELD scurry around like a disturbed anthill for a few days, but that's second-hand news. Normally Natalia would be more interested, would know more about it than just that, but she's got other things on her mind right now.

 

It's been a few months now, and if she's honest, the threshold for _concerned_ is passed, even shrinking in the rear-view mirror.

She'd suspected it might come to this, and hoped it wouldn't. She hadn't really planned on either, because this isn't the kind of thing you can plan for beyond knowing that it's coming and bracing for its arrival.

Natalia knows Clint Barton better than anyone else does. She even knows his whole life-story, which is more than most people ever manage - Fury and Coulson included. She knows the bare handful of things he won't even admit happened out loud. She knows what made him, where his coping mechanisms are rooted, and knows exactly why - up till now - he's always been the one who could handle things.

Anything. Everything.

Not shrug it off, not repress, not get buried. Be able to accept it, know something happened and what it meant and then get on with it. It unnerved a lot of people, how he could get angry, or sad, or whatever the fuck the situation dragged up and be those things and then let them go. Not have them stick and drag him back.

Natalia knows the reasons.

You can't quite call it _healthy_ , if by healthy you mean that you'll ever be able to live like most people, take on all the trappings of a civillian life and live quietly until you die of contented old age. It's not like any of it, any of _them_ , the people who do the work that they do, at the level they do it, can ever be called the kind of "healthy" that applies to the rest of the world. You hit a point where you're never going to get that. Natalia hit hers pretty damn young, for all the obvious reasons. But Clint didn't take a lot longer, although he took a lot longer to admit it.

An awful lot of people assumed that Clint stopped even trying to date pretty soon after he brought Natalia to SHIELD _because_ of Natalia. An awful lot of people assume an awful lot of things about them, period, and they let it be because it makes no real difference. But it actually had nothing to do with her, and in fact he spent the first few months ignoring any of the testing seduction she'd aimed in his direction, looking to find his breaking point. Everyone has one - she knew that then and it's still true. But some of them, you can't get there from here. Clint's turned out to be one you can get to until he's absolutely sure you've got no ulterior motive he doesn't like. So it had nothing to do with her.

He'd just finally hit the point where he had to admit he couldn't do it: he couldn't _have_ what most people wanted out of a relationship and he couldn't give it either. He could fake it for about three months, and he could fake it perfectly; and the worst thing was it wasn't the feelings he would have to fake, just the behaviours.

Because he was good at being a boyfriend, the same way he's good at most things he decides he wants to be good at. Clint can be the world's perfect boyfriend, straight out of your favourite romance novel - for about ninety days, give or take a week.

It's not coincidence that "ninety days, give or take a week" is just about the maximum for a cover that runs counter to type - that is, one that isn't more or less yourself with a few cosmetic details changed. After that, people start to fracture and the cracks show, behavioural inconsistencies running from the minor to the . . . unfortunate. It's bad for the agent and it's bad for the success of the mission.

And bad for the relationship. Clint can be the perfect boyfriend but no matter how much he loves whoever it is, he can only be that for about three months, because none of them are really him.

He'd been running up against that wall in his last real relationship when he got sent after Natalia, and he'd been trying desperately to figure out how to fix it. It didn't work. And when Morse - one of the best out of the Level 6 agents, and Clint'd thought maybe someone else who lived in their world would make everything different - broke it off, Clint gave up.

Natalia's relatively certain that Morse is one of the people who blames her, though the other woman's never been anything but professional. At the time, Natalia'd had no idea how to talk to anyone who wasn't a handler, a mark, or her "sister" in the program, and by now there's too much water gone under that bridge to make it worth it. She regrets that, though.

The point is, though, it might not be what normal people would call healthy, but it's also not like anybody in their sphere is normal. Field agent classifications run from Levels 1 to 5, and if you survive Level 5, manage live through it for more than about a year without resigning, dying or having a breakdown, and especially if you manage promotion to Level 6. . . .at that point you've long ago given up on "normal" and moved to _does it work_ and _is it sustainable_.

There are between fifteen and twenty Level 6s in SHIELD, at any given time, depending on who's died and who's either passed certification or managed the field promotion. There's an ongoing argument about which experience is actually more harrowing. There's not a lot of people who can find any strategy that works sustainably for coping with the shit they swim in; it's gruelling to get to Level 5 and most people burn out there, request transfer out of Field Operations or demotion back to 4. Or they get killed. Or they fall apart past the point where they can put themselves back together.

Clint and Natalia are both 7s, not 6s. It's where the levels stop - at that point the numerical designation just stands in for _superlative_ and everything else is a matter of speciality, inclination, _which_ half-dozen languages you can speak well enough to be invisible, and the limitations of size and other biological details: the pitch of the voice, the shape of the body, the colour of the skin. 6s have a certain amount of leniency in terms of protocol, behaviour, regulation, because they're just that valuable; 7s have . . . a lot more. And of the 7s, only Melinda May's survived longer than either of them.

There's never more than about a half-dozen at the best of times. Everything that's true of 6s is exponentially so for 7s.

And up until now the answers for the questions of function and sustainability for Clint Barton have been an easy _yes_. Up until now, nobody's been able to literally control and fuck with his fucking mind.

When most people think of someone who's uncontrollable, they think of someone like Stark: someone who's rejection of authority is a big screaming explosion in the sky overhead. Sometimes literally. Someone who wants to make sure you don't even think about trying.

Clint doesn't have to do that. Doesn't feel the fundamental need. He's only said anything about it once, one of the nights when everyone above Level 5 had some kind of paperwork or interview or something and they all used the excuse to crowd around the only other people in the world who lived in theirs. The resultant mass-delivery of Indian takeout to the old SHIELD building had come with a second mass delivery of not quite enough beer to actually get anyone intoxicated, and because of all that there ended up a cluster of agents with varying levels of peculiarity in really ergonomically incorrect positions, eating and working and having conversations that would make most people blanch, throw up, or lose sleep to nightmares for the rest of their lives.

And some that wouldn't.

Someone'd been working in Vegas and told a story or two from the hypnotist show their cover'd worked setup and teardown crew for. He'd filled a few moments with what kind of people were harder and easier to hypnotise, according to the star of the show, and noticed Clint's very slight shake of the head and slighter smile. Asked, _What?_

Natalia'd been a little surprised when Clint'd answered, until she'd taken count of the fact that he was three beers in, not two. He didn't let himself do that much, and this probably counted as the closest to safe company any of them had.

_You know when the hypnotism starts?_ Clint'd said. _It starts the minute the guy says "come up here on the stage," and you do it. It starts the minute you start letting him tell you to do things that you wouldn't do on your own. You don't have any other reason to go on the stage - you're the audience. The only reason to go up on stage is because he told you, doing something he wants you to do._

He'd leaned against the wall and gone on, _It's real enough; it works. It's just letting you tap into stuff your body does anyway, chemicals and shit. But you make it work. It's your choice. Hypnotism works by deciding, over and over again, to let the hypnotist take charge, until you're so used to it that it's easier to do what he says than not to. And if you let it go far enough it's fucking hard to get out of, but you have to let it start. And people do it all the time. Even people who know better go up and think, I'll just let him try. They think, I could open my hands but let's see what happens if I don't. I could tell him to go screw himself when he tells me to cluck like a chicken, but I'm not going to - let's just see. And it gets easier to let him drive than it is to wake up. So anybody who goes up on stage is already letting him drive, so none of them count. The hardest person to hypnotise is the one who stays in their seat. The one who doesn't volunteer. The one who, if she gets picked, says "no" even when everyone's trying to convince her it'll be fun. Who never even lets him try._

_The only way to win is not to play?_ Melinda'd said, sardonically, and Clint'd raised his beer in salute.

Kinkade, one of the newer 6s, had asked, _That why Coulson ends up with Nerf darts drenched in red paint on his desk when he sends you somewhere you said you won't go? Assertion of independence?_

_I don't go places I've said I won't go,_ Clint'd replied, and there'd been some laughter - but not from anyone who'd been there long, and who knew Clint'd been there longer. He'd raised both eyebrows and said, _The darts are just to tell him he's a jerk and I fucking hate Panama and I want him to know that and also to have to get Facilities to clean some fucking paint of his desk before he can use it._

There'd been more laughter, because that was true whether or not you knew the other part wasn't a joke.

Melinda had liked Kinkade. Natalia could tell by the way she'd caught the man's arm later to murmur, _He's telling the truth, you know. The darts are a friendly reminder._

_Yeah?_ asked Kinkade. _What's an unfriendly reminder, a grenade?_

Melinda hadn't answered that one, just smiled, and that's is just as well; Natalia'd've been annoyed if she had, if she'd given out that much. Because there aren't any unfriendly reminders and never will be. Clint wouldn't bother. When Clint gets told to do something he won't do, he just doesn't do it. Warnings, friendly or otherwise, are for people he likes enough that he doesn't want to stick them with the consequences of that - including the part where he won't like you much anymore.

If he doesn't like you or at least respect and value you in the first place, he'll just do what he's going to do, and won't do what he won't, and when and where that lines up with what orders you think you're giving - and where it doesn't - is your problem. It'll probably be the kind of problem that ends up with you dead, or wishing you were, but it's all yours.

Clint's like that. Most people aren't.

Most people obey out of habit. Most people are half-hypnotized all the time, there's just so many hypnotists none of them get exactly what they want. People do what they're told to get along, to get approval, to get a place in the world; orders conflict in how much you want to follow them, but it's habit, it's all weighed and decided before you even think. That's how humans work, from cradle to death, and most people need it to work like that because choosing all the time would drive them off the deep end, or get them stuck in the mud.

That got broken, for Clint, around the time he turned seventeen. Natalia knows why; most people don't. Now everything is does is a choice. There's a cost for it; there's always a cost. It's part of what makes intimacy hard, usually impossible. It tangles up in paranoia and makes it hard for him to stay in one place, or be one person all the time. He just can't fix those parts without giving up the bit that matters, and he'll never do that of his own free will.

If he does something he's not sure about for you, it's an act of trust, and that'll get taken right back if you fuck up and it never gets given twice. And it's not hard to fuck up.

That's why Coulson'd get reminders, every time Clint thought he might be even able to see that line on the horizon. It's why Fury gets backtalk while everyone around them stares in horrified amazement. It's a reminder: _Don't do this. There's no way back._ Clint doesn't actually need to show defiance, the way (for example) Stark desperately, endlessly does. Doesn't need the reassurance. You can put a gun to Clint's head and he'll have already decided whether or not he'd rather you shoot him than do what you're saying, and even if he'd rather do it, that just means he's made that choice, that time, for now. Thirty seconds later - who knows?

And that's the foundation of it, of all of it - Clint chooses. He's always the one who does.

Until Loki, and that fucking staff.

 

In the unreal story it still sometimes feels like the whole fucking ridiculous mess should have been, with space invasions and magical-but-not-magical hyper-powered artifacts and all that shit - in that story, getting rid of the influence, getting rid of the mechanism of control, and getting rid of Loki: those should have been enough. After that, things should've got better.

In real life, some things take a long time to get better. And sometimes, they just don't. Natalia isn't sure which this one is.

She honestly wishes it'd been her. That their places could've been swapped. Not out of any kind of sentimental garbage, but because it would've been . . .easier to handle. Safer.

It's not that the Staff wouldn't've wrecked her. It might've spat her out the other end in a catatonic ball, at least after the crisis pass. And the idea makes her sick and (if she thinks about it too hard) makes her hands shake, not that she'd admit that to anyone. But she's done this before. She knows she can. She knows how it works.

And it's fucked up. And it's once again probably not really what other people'd call healthy. But it works, and it keeps working, and she knows how. More than anything, she knows how to make her mind _stop_. Shut up. She knows how to block out the questions that eat at you, after someone else reaches in and _fucks_ over everything you thought you knew. When you wonder, all the time, if you really got away, if you really know what's real, if you're really in control, if you're _really_ free this time. When you sit in bed awake the middle of the night because you can't sleep because you can't ever, ever be fucking sure that you're _you_ , that you know what happened yesterday and it really was yesterday, that you've managed to actually _wake up_ or if this is just another god-damned level of the dream you can't escape.

She's done it. More than once. Maybe even more than twice, because she's seen the files and there were four years with a mother, outside the program - watched and assessed and guarded, but not interfered with. Just another kid from another Moscow neighbourhood with another struggling single mother. So they must have had to rewrite the whole world for the first time right there at the start. She doesn't remember that, doesn't remember much of anything from before the program. And it's easy to rewrite kids, since they barely have any grip on reality to start with. Whatever they did, it worked absolutely fucking perfectly: ten years later she called in the kill from inside that single mother's house, beside that woman's bed. She called in from the phone on the bedside table, as instructed in her mission briefing. While the blood was still warm. She didn't question why she was supposed to use that phone. It didn't matter.

Right then she'd known exactly how everything worked. Exactly what was true.

Four years after that she got into a car Barton was driving, knowing that actually, she knew absolutely _nothing_. That for all she knew it would turn out that the sky was actually green and people in Australia really fucking did walk upside-down all day, because that was just how far the lies went. She'd had to start from there and figure out what she was going to believe, what she was going to _do_. And then a few years after that she'd had to do it again, standing in a hallway disoriented from the drugs, with a gun in her hand and two men in front of her, one standing and carefully, gently, soothingly telling her where she was and what that meant, and the other on the floor, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the leg and a cut on his forehead, clearly in agony and out of time, just. . . waiting to see what she'd do.

Thirty seconds later the upright man was a corpse, and the other was helping her find the bare minimum of clothes to wear to a fucking gunfight, because a tie-backed thigh-length hospital gown wasn't it. She'd made the choice, but she still didn't know fuck all. Tell someone stories long enough, especially if they're exhausted or drugged or in pain, and they'll make up the memories themselves and it'll feel just as real as anything that actually happened, and that's where she'd been left.

And when that happens there aren't any touchstones. There aren't any incontrovertible signs. Nothing acts as proof. You just . . . decide.

Natalia hasn't been able to take anything inside her own head for granted since she was eighteen, and she shouldn't've done so before that. And it's something that'll always tell, in her, she knows. Means there's things she needs other people can get along without, makes her job much closer to her fundamental identity than most people could stand. Means she needs . . . someone whose judgement she's decided is better than hers, to check herself against. But it also means that if she gets knocked down, she already knows what to do about it, and that she can do it, and that's . . . a lot.

Clint's not like that. Clint's always known his own mind. A lot of time it's the only thing he's known - everyone else might've been lying, probably was, might've been lying for years, but he knows what he thought, what he saw, what he remembers, knows _his own mind._ When people fool him - and people have - he still knows how to find the edges of that, how to work back to what he knows is true and at least define the limits of the things he can't know. And everything he is, he's built around that. Used that as the foundation. And he couldn't be who he is if he didn't.

Natalia lost that years and years ago, and everything she is now she made without it, and that's why she wishes it'd been her, instead of him. She might've ended up curled up in a shaking wreck who couldn't get out of bed at the end of it, but she's been there before and she knows the way out.

And she's . . .better with being helpless. With knowing where the line is, where the point comes that _nobody_ can fight anymore, and what can take you there. She knew that even before she passed her final training test. They made sure all of their assets knew it, to know the point where no matter your loyalty, or devotion, or dedication, no matter what reason you have not to break - you will break. To know when that's coming and what to do after, if there is an after.

Clint's okay with big helplessness. The fate of the world, the course of history, who lives or dies, that kind of thing. Surprisingly good. But Natalia swears no man on earth she's met yet can handle the private ones, the personal ones. When it's your skin and your body and right here. It means theres always this added layer of kicking the shit out of themselves like they could've done anything about it, which makes everything worse. And Natalia -

She's not sure if he can rebuild. Or keep from falling further apart, to the point where rebuilding isn't possible because there's nothing left there. The thought feels like slime and acid in her head, rancid and foul and burning, it feels disloyal enough to make her stomach heave and it scares the everloving fuck out of her because this is - it's not supposed to -

Natalia knows she could have survived being unmade. Again. She's not sure she can survive Clint falling the rest of the way to pieces. Him not _being him._ Whether she can get through that. And it's not better if she can, but he still falls. It's worse.

There is nobody she can explain that to. Not a single damn person.

Tonight, she finds him on the floor of the Manhattan apartment they're sharing.

They're both still on recuperative leave. Technically that means they aren't cleared for return to the field until Medical signs off, and shouldn't even be doing analytic or administrative shit without special dispensation. Realistically, it means that if they get handed something that lands them in the infirmary, Chief of Medical's going to throw a shrieking fit and threaten mayhem, and he has limited patience for seeing them around.

For once, Natalia'd actually prefer to comply with the damn regulations, given they'd leave room for the _site_ of recuperation being a well-supplied chalet halfway up a mountain two hours' from the nearest other human being. And because it's the one time she'd rather comply, of course this is also the one time it's not her or Barton behind the bending of the rules, because otherwise they'll go crazy. It's SHIELD and even more it's the fucking WSC and the endless need of high-powered bureaucracy to get told the same fucking thing fifty different ways and at forty different times.

They are straining her patience.

Accordingly, while the apartment's a loft rather than a penthouse per se, it's still fucking expensive, it's as comfortable as Natalia wants it to be, and she's sending SHIELD the bills directly and she's sending all of them. _Including_ the ones for vodka, ice-cream, her mani-pedis, and Starbucks. It's petty and unprofessional and she doesn't care: the Powers That Be want them here, they can pay for it. She'd managed _not_ to snap at Maria when telling her so, because none of it's Maria's fault. And she's managed to keep from reverting to pure Agent-Director formality with Nick, which would mean the same thing, because she's got exactly just enough sympathy left in her to realize he's fielding more shit right now than is reasonable for a human being, even after swinging a coup with moving one of his most reliable supporters into the Secretaryship for the Council. But that's _all_ she's got.

She hasn't felt this frayed and brittle since coming back from Moscow to find out the captivity she thought was three drug-hazed days was actually three and a half drug-hazed weeks. She kind of suspects Hill and Fury can both tell. And now, when she comes back to the apartment, she finds Clint on the floor.

He's sitting there, his back against the supporting wall and face to the windows, knees bent. She sees his - presumably - loaded P30 on the floor beside him. It's not a good sign: as a rule, _she_ carries guns around the house when hypervigilant, and he carries knives. Firearms are tools he grudgingly uses; they're not his security blanket. He's in the same t-shirt he wore to pretend to sleep on the couch last night, and the same sweats. No socks, no shoes. His arms are propped on his knees and his head is bowed. He looks like he's been there for a while.

Natalia just wants to kill something. She wasn't built for _this_. She was literally _made_ , carved out of the raw material of a human four-year-old and spun up through the next ten goddamn years, and it wasn't for this. It wasn't to fix people. It was to lie and kill and control and manipulate in the name of someone else, of a larger cause. She's _good_ at that. This is something else, it's . .

There are people at SHIELD who are built for this, or who at least who spent years of school and practice building themselves. And it's great to have them and they're good at what _they_ do, but for once . . . for once all the things that normally make them the best choice, all the detachment and boundaries and knowledge and everything else, make them the last people who are going to be any fucking help.

For the same reasons, even, that Natalia refused to talk to a single person in Psychiatric until at least four months after she got back, the second time. Reasons that are hard to pin down without just saying _you're not real_ , which makes no sense until you realize what it really means, and then explains everything. You can't trust them, and the reasons why have nothing to do with them at all.

But that means there's only her, whether she's built for it or not.

Natalia sighs, but silently. She drops her bag and keys and jacket on the floor. She'd normally put them away, hates random untidy clutter, but fuck it for now - she'll fix it later. Maybe. Maybe she'll just abandon this whole damn apartment with them still there. But for now she's got shit in her hands she needs to get rid of. She drops it all and then kicks her ankle-boots off, one of them hitting the wall and leaving a mark.

She goes and sits down beside him. He doesn't do anything to acknowledge she's there until she makes a move to pick up the gun - then, his hand twitches.

Natalia pauses for a second. Says, " _Don't_ make me fight you for the gun, Barton. That would be embarrassing."

His mouth twists, but he doesn't interfere as she takes the gun and unloads it. She gets rid of the round in the chamber, throws the magazine to the other side of the room and the loose bullet as far as she can down the opposite hallway, and then flicks the safety on the weapon itself before dropping it on the ground to one side. "What the fuck were you going to do with that?" she asks, quietly.

As if she doesn't know.

Clint stares out the window and when he speaks, it isn't really an answer. "I don't know if I can do this," is what he says, in his flattest and most monotone - and most honest - voice. "I don't know if I'm equi - I don't know if I can handle this. I don't."

Hearing her own doubts out of his mouth sends ice and iron up her spine. Hearing them in that voice, affectless and assessing, makes her want to kill something. Failing that, she says, in her own flattest voice, "Of course you can." When he looks at her, she continues, "If I have to drag you through this by the hair, _I will do so_."

She's said other things in that voice. It's as deliberate as any operational persona, as specifically crafted, and it means she doesn't fucking _care_ what reality thinks, this is what she is going to make happen. Or die trying. And nothing's managed to get close to killing her yet. She says it in Russian, too, just to drive home the point.

Clint's face is expressionless. It isn't an argument, but it isn't an answer, either.

"He's gone," she says. " _Clint_ ," she adds, when he looks away. She reaches over and makes him look at her, catching his jaw in one hand. "He's gone."

"And what if he isn't?" Clint demands. He jerks his head back; his eyes are guarded and his mouth is twisted. "What then, Tasha?" There's a nasty bitter edge to it that she hates.

And that is the question.

He won't take the out that it wasn't really him; she pretty much always knew he wouldn't. He remembers at least as well as you do when you have a fever, and he remembers making choices and plans, and carrying them out. It wasn't Loki just taking over his body and using it, he was using Clint's mind just as much, just . . .muzzling all the parts that make up a whole person and replacing them with himself, what he wanted. But it means Clint's stuck with that question.

_How do you know he's gone?_

Natalia takes a deep breath and doesn't call him any of the things she doesn't really mean, that aren't remotely true, that she wouldn't even want to say except that he's fucking with the foundations of her world - and that isn't even him, it's Loki and what he left behind, the fucking bastard and she is _not_ going to confuse who is at fucking fault here. Ever.

"Then," she says calmly instead, "I will take a fucking flight to London, and I will take Jane Foster, and I will lock her in a small fucking concrete room in fucking Azerbaijan until she makes me a new inter-world bridge and then I will start _killing_ people until _someone_ in Asgard tells me how to fucking _fix this_."

"You have a bolt-hole in Azerbaijan?" Clint asks. It might be the worst attempt at redirection he has ever made, including several made while actually drunk and one made out of his mind on morphine. Natasha glares at him until he looks down.

She says, "Don't try to change the subject."

Clint puts his face in his hands, and for six breaths - his breaths, she counts them, watches skin and bones move with them - he doesn't say anything. Then he sits back up and holds one forearm with the other hand, his own fingers tight enough to dig into his flesh. "Sorry," he says. "I'm sorry. I'm not - today isn't good."

It's at least past the dangerous moment, for now. She hopes.

"Barton, if you ever fucking apologize to me _again_ ," Natalia says, with feeling, "for something like this, I will kick your ass. And I won't kiss it better afterwards."

Clint makes a noise that might be a laugh or might just be the sound of someone being strangled and trying to breathe. But he manages, "Duly noted, Agent Romanoff," in a dry imitation of a dead man, before his head falls again.

Natalia waits. Then she reaches over and worms her hand into his free one, arm crossing over one of his and under the other. "Hey," she says. "It'll be fine. It's over. This is just . . . ." she sighs. "The really fucking shitty aftermath."

Clint doesn't say anything, but he does let his fingers interlace with hers, and kisses the back of her hand.

 

He manages to sleep that night.

He manages it because of something almost nobody's ever noticed. Natalia's not even sure Coulson did, knows Fury hasn't. She's not sure about Maria. He sleeps because after suggestion doesn't work and logic gets Clint being really fucking avoidant, Natalia tosses out the rest of the persuasion tactics as a waste of time and skips right to a flat edged, _Barton, take the fucking lorazepam_.

The look he gives her is briefly hateful and definitely sour, but he swallows the pills anyway.

That's the secret, the thing nobody's ever noticed - Natalia gets to tell him to do things he's not going to do. Gets to impose her judgement, push it over his, even just sometimes. It'll last unless and until she fucks it up, and then she'll never get it back, and no one else will ever get it to start with. So she can tell him to take the fucking sedative when he'd tell anyone else, including any doctor you cared to come up with and definitely including Nick Fury, to go fuck themselves.

They sleep on the couch. Natalia's curled up relatively comfortably in the corner and Clint's using her legs as a pillow. Natalia's read more on sleep and how to make it work than most experts in the field and this is not an approved environment - but the part she knows that they don't is Clint didn't sleep in a bed until after he turned fifteen. And that this couch is a lot bigger and more comfortable than the one he used up until then, even taking the difference between a boy and a full grown man into account.

The best sign Clint's worn thin is when he starts sleeping on couches, even if he doesn't have to.

It's drugged sleep. Second best, but better than nothing. Every single agent above Level 5 knows their tolerances: what works, what doesn't, when it stops being worth it because the rebound kicks in. And every single one of them knows the drugs are a severely mixed blessing and just waiting to fuck you up, and so something you turn to as a last resort and not for long. Only one agent Natalia's ever known hasn't had to run through the damn cognitive behavioural training on how to teach yourself to sleep again, and Lachlen's clearly some kind of mutant. The only thing that messes up her sleep is a mission that takes too many amphetamines to get through. Even then, she recovers faster than anyone else. If the woman could bottle whatever she's got, she could make more money than Stark, squared.

_I don't know_ , she's always said. _I just decide to sleep. I don't know why everyone can't do it._

Natalia doesn't know how Barton's going to be when he wakes up. There's a lot of stuff she doesn't know right now. But she means everything she said, and she does have a bolt-hole in Azerbaijan to do it with, and if nothing else kidnapping Foster will probably get Thor's attention. Natalia can go from there.


End file.
